In her second piece addressing the new British PM, Arzu asks whether Andy Burnham, is as he claims, really able and willing to change the script, and tell a new story of ‘nation’. As a US ground invasion of Iran looms , the new PM must choose a vision of ‘us’ that encompasses the masses of oppressed peoples world-wide. Anything else is just US lite.
It seems I am still though, addressing you through the lens of English Literature. Indulge me. It is more important than people think. The degree in English Literature, the working for free for a newspaper after university because you couldn’t get paid work (it scares me, how much are trajectories are the same), all help inordinately, the ability to present, even to create, stories, narratives, metanarratives.
It is also, I have discovered, a way to connect with you, who might otherwise (I hope I am wrong) still peddle the language of division, disassociation and cultural dissonance between the (racialised as white) British and (racialised by Islam) Muslims. So let’s talk the language of Shelley (not the Hywell Bennet sitcom, but we should probably revisit that too), and specifically ‘Masque of Anarchy’. It’s a staple of the left’s cultural canon, this poem on the Peterloo massacre of 1819. But for you and me and those with our degree it has just that bit more significant. Signifying just that bit more. Because we know that as readers, we are also its authors. We (left, Muslim, other) can and have made it ours. Because we all have the power to create necessary stories. We don’t all how the power to universalise them. Those with the power (yes, you Andy Burnham) have the responsibility to ensure they are good and true. That is the only way any and all of ‘us’, in the long run, stand a chance.
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A new story of the nation is part of the Counternarratives to Islamophobia project’s demands in 2018. Five European universities and IHRC were behind it. We called them recommendations, because we lacked the power behind our words, so we thought. But demands are what need to be made now, and what we need (we (everyone) need) realised if this failing and flailing nation can be saved from the economic, political and social violence already rending it asunder.
Islamophobia is the narrative that devours the soul of this society, fracturing the bonds of social being, fed not by uncontextualized social hatred, but the narratives peddled by the state. If your laws (whether Sus or anti-terrorist), your policies and your policing, your education system, and of course your (not so independent) media keep feeding narratives of hate, we all of us, including Muslims, internalise them.
Literature then, with its multitude of stories old and new, can help us imagine. Give us space to breath. God knows we need that now. It is the first pillar of decoloniality – imagine the world anew. No more restrictions based on the old political consensus.
But then, you’re not a decolonial are you? If you were so inclined I would have recommended Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? by Judith Butler, but let’s stick to Shelley.
You have named neoliberalism as the enemy. So far so good? Except you need to name what it has done, rather than just attach it to Mrs. T’s economic policies. It is the ideology that broke (the idea of) society (not Maggie, despite your repeated claims, all on her own). Neoliberalism’s story – that competition would set us free – made us each an enemy of the ‘other’. No more us, no more society. Every PM since and including Margaret Thatcher fell foul of this divide and rule. All since have had to look over their shoulder as their usefulness to neoliberalism’s winners wanes. Is that you too, Andy?
You say you want to make this moment a circuit-breaker for Britain, a new political and economic model incoming according to your ‘unscripted’ noteless comments outside Downing Street yesterday. Neoliberalism, you have said, in what passes for radical these days, has had its day on these shores. And these shores are what you have repeatedly said you will focus on. Not like your predecessor, ‘Never here, Keir’ always pootling about on foreign affairs. Foreign policy in this imagining is the bastard sibling of immigration, tainted by un-Britishness. And there we are, back to square one.
I asked before, why you failed to name the racism and the racist state that foments it as the source of societal disunity. The distraction from the crises of (domestic) society – point the finger at the ‘minorities’.
You namechecked the Peterloo massacre a few times already (not today though, interesting). It is of course, bog standard in parts of the left, to connect with this Manchester event and specifically the poem it inspired. For those unfamiliar, eighteen were killed, maybe 800 injured when infantrymen and Hussars deployed alongside artillery, ran through crowds of protestors numbered in their tens of thousands. The Leader of the House and Foreign Secretary Lord Castlereagh became associated in the emerging working class mind with the repressive policies that led to this military deployment against the British poor. Men and women, old and young, who were literally disenfranchised – universal representation alongside food, being some of their main demands.
Shelley framed the Foreign Secretary thus:
I met Murder on the way –
He had a mask like Castlereagh –
Very smooth he looked, yet grim;
Seven blood-hounds followed him:
I am sure we will get more Peterloo lore during your premiership. It is without doubt important, and it should hold a central place in the (new) story of the nation. As should the 1989 Hillsborough tragedy, a cause you have championed. Let’s call it also a massacre, the result of police negligence itself fuelled by the demonisation of the Liverpool fans, so many of whom lost their lives. But how will they be used? Because, the driver of the hate that resulted in these deaths 170 years apart, was the process of demonisation that divides communities today.
There have been many massacres, some remembered, many silent. Deaths dealt by violence, maybe not directly physical, but violence nonetheless. They are silent massacres, and part of your job, as the new story-teller in chief, is surely to make that clear. These narratives push amnesia, and between euphoria and desperation, we all become addicted. Forget the neo-liberal establishment. Forget capitalism rampant and unrestrained. Forget the thousands and thousands who died because of these policies, their homes too cold or too hot, health services not available or like so much of the beleaguered British population, too poor to cope. Believing every word a gem, we have our brains knocked out by them.
Peterloo is not exceptional, and Castlereagh wasn’t a bad apple or a novice. The violence meted out on St. Peter’s Field was more of the that meted out to those colonised by the same government. Castlereagh himself was a veteran of ordering such crackdowns in Ireland. Australia was undergoing the beginnings of genocide under this secretary of state’s purview. But then so were the massacres and usurpations before Castlereagh and after.
Today you reappointed Shabana Mahmood under whose Castlereaghic reign (of just 10 and a half months), more than 3,500 people have been arrested for terrorism offences, most of them for protesting the genocide in Gaza. Of those 1500 have been charged. Most of them are (‘white’) pensioners. When truth be actually told, Islamophobia has killed us all. But thus far, you still seem to want to stick to your predecessors’ story. We are back to Judith Butler again, as more and more lives become disposable in the ‘national’ systems of representation you still haven’t named, let alone shamed. Do it now.
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There is the British ‘us’, a white working class idealised in its victimisation (maybe inadvertently) by Shelley. Then there is the ‘us’, all of us affected by the neo-colonial violence of today led by US. Which ‘us’ do you mean?
The distraction these narratives of hate create, don’t just work as domestic chains imprisoning us as we sleep, they are justification for this nation’s ever increasing immoral foreign policy. Muslims are the obvious target, but everyone who is not powerful, here, there and everywhere are its victim.
The UK allowed US fighter jets to use its bases in the Iran War, the first act of which was to bomb 179 schoolchildren to smithereens. Maybe Shelley would have immortalised them in poetry had he lived today; maybe he would have urged all those they symbolise to rise in unvaquishable number against the US. And of course the UK has helped with spy flights and more in the genocide in Gaza behind which stands the US. Now, just today as you took power, the man to whom you made your first phone call, is readying the US for a ground invasion of the Islamic Republic. Will you follow suit? Will you pretend to neutrality all the while complicit in the murder of innocents? Or will you take stand?
The forever wars undertaken in the name of the US, and its bloodhounds are intimately linked to the neoliberalism you blame Britain’s ills on. It’s simple really, end your complicity in them. The difficulties of the next ten years are a given, whatever story you choose. Make it a true one. Do something truly good.
Because it is not just the divisions between us on this isle that are false, so too are the divisions between ‘nations’ all struggling with the impact of a US unrestrained. Now crumbling, it is intent on dragging everyone and everything down with it. The climate crisis, which you will now need to urgently tackle, does not respect borders, and feeds like Shelley’s ‘Anarchy’ on the wars the US perpetrates.
We have both met murder on the way, and he wears the mask of Reagan, Biden, Obama, Trump, the Bushes Jr. and Sr. and we could go on. Who are the blood hounds who follow them?
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It runs counter to your claims to be of the working class, this tiptoeing around foreign policy. And no (as Annie Lennox so articulately expressed) your comments about Gaza, were not nearly enough. It is also, a lie. Your first call on entering Downing Street, was to Trump. You shared before assuming office this morning, that nothing will change in your government’s policy to Ukraine (you spoke to Zelensky later). Less imagination, more plus ça change.
‘Andy’s for us’, someone said it, you mentioned whom in your speech on accepting the leadership of the Labour Party on Friday. Someone ‘normal’ and now it’s your slogan. It’s such a good one, well done.
Such competency in the written and spoken word, at least in this neck of the woods (the many degrees of cultural separation between Makerfield and Merton in the UK, are, in a global perspective mean nothing), is sadly, usually, cynical. Is this you, Andy? When you talk about ‘us’? You have, in the last few days, used phrases like ‘everyone in’, ‘pulling together’, a ‘new national sense of unity’. But still you haven’t named the causes of the divisions, or even who is divided. Without that, we – the divided and tormented British public – will be left trying to do the imagining ourselves. It could be a clever ruse – let everyone believe in the community they want, is the one being served by your plans. But eventually, without your leadership, it will be the vision of the truly powerful that fills this narrative gap, and that as we have seen already is the one of ‘whiteness’ supreme.
And it’s not just ‘us’ in Britain, who are affected. Your pandering to the idea that the PM needs to dedicate more time to the UK’s domestic affairs belies how much these affairs are controlled by what happens beyond our borders. By all means, bring utilities into public control (and ownership, I am of the same generation, we all want it), but educate everyone how the vagaries of pricing are impacted by the wars perpetuated by the US (and in this include the Ukraine war if, as you say honesty is your chief policy). Make clear how the integration of the UK economy – yes, vastly impacted by de-industrialisation, but not because of it – into neoliberal financial networks, will not be fixed without a brutal, yes brutal, realignment of economics and politics on your government’s part. Make clear, with all that talent you have, that the war on Iran is precisely a punishment against a state that has defied vassalage to the US, and succeeded in imagining a world that survives and even thrives despite US violence. Much of the rest of the world is catching up. You have the opportunity to catch Britain up too.
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Literature, as I said, it’s important. Some other politician said it too. Read other literatures, he said, to understand other cultures – their differences and also the core values that we all share whoever we are. He loved Les Miserables, and Quiet Flows the Don. War and Peace of course, and so many others. He even perused Jane Austen. He used his understanding and imagination to build resilience and resistance against the violence of the US within the borders of his state with institution building, and beyond by inspiration.
Do I need to tell you his name? He made the ultimate sacrifice to save his nation.
No-one is asking you for martyrdom.
Just an end to the violence over there, and over here, with the stroke of a pen and a new story of ‘us’.
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Shelley, painted the picture of many villains in ‘Masque of Anarchy’. Death rides alongside Anarchy as they wreak havoc, charging down from Manchester to London, where they are greeted as ‘God, King and Law’ by the lawyers, priests, the upper classes, all clamouring for more, complaining they did not have enough. The downtrodden meanwhile are trampled further, terrorised:
… each dweller, panic-stricken,
Felt his heart with terror sicken
It is a vision of the terrorism of the state. That’s what that term was coined to mean as the French Revolution went, according to many stories, wrong. It is terrifying. More so, when pondering today, what the significance of your journey to the premiership means.
You mentioned hope today. Shelley does too. Weak at first, the unity of the masses, their understanding that they are many and those that oppress them are few, brings Hope, a woman distraught, strength. We are many, they are few. How many times has that been quoted at us? You have said you will be collaborative (“I’ll try and find common ground with anyone,” you said) that you will sit with anyone, even Kemi Badenoch, if it means progress. Well then, make it true. Not simply for a (white by default) ‘us’, a mirror to the US now unmasked under Trump. But all of us. Terrorised by the US, downtrodden or resisting.
Your proto-story suggests you understand. The investigations suggest you don’t care.
With Keir Starmer in meltdown mode, this man is being presented as the saviour of the Labour Party.
But did you know that last time Andy Burnham stood for leader, he pledged that his FIRST foreign trip would be to Israel?
Here’s what else I’ve discovered: pic.twitter.com/wvqhT1mARu
— Jody McIntyre (@jodymcintyre_) May 11, 2026
I want to be hopeful, not cynical, so here’s the demand we didn’t make in 2018. Be, as you claim, the circuit-breaker. Not the new circus master. Be, in Shelley’s words, the hero of this nation’s yet unwritten story. I would add, of ‘us’.
Arzu Merali is a writer and researcher based in London, UK. She has been rereading a lot of poetry recently. Find her on X and Instagram @arzumerali, and on other social media platforms. Read her work on arzumerali.com.
Images:
Andy Burnham, official portrait CC by 3.0
Peterloo Massacre, print published by Richard Carlile, 1 Oct 1819 via Manchester Archives
Minab graves, CC Iranian Foreign Media Department (2026)
